In which Day 2 is summarized.
Fuck this! Quitting is hard, and I don’t want it to be this hard, and I hate nicotine, and I hate my fucking neuroreceptors, and I hate dopamine, and the nicotine patch is weird, and this entire process sucks rocks.
All posts by Mush
I quit! Again.
In which I tackle the old nicotine addiction. Again.
I quit smoking two or three times last year, and each time I was really ready to succeed… but failed because I just had one cigarette. Or three. Or five. Which, of course, led to smoking full-time soon after.
The first time I quit, I quit cold turkey. It worked for a few weeks, but then I broke down and bummed a smoke at a gig and bought a pack within the week. The second time, I used nicotine gum. It worked for awhile, but the gum tastes bad and the whole park-and-suck routine made my gums sore. The third time, I used lozenges, but those gave me mouth ulcers and made my already rapid dental tartar build-up even worse because of the sugary, chalky gunk they’re made of.
I failed to stay on the recommended dosages with both products because they were mildly uncomfortable to use. When in a high-risk circumstance I’d just go ahead and smoke because, let’s face it, that’s what my neuroreceptors wanted me to do: smoke the damn cigarette and ease the annoying cravings. There’s no better way than inhalation to get nicotine into the brain. Mmm, smoking. Continue reading I quit! Again.
Homework.
In which this treeware weighs five pounds!
The only actual book I’ve had to buy all year arrived today. I bought it used from Amazon, because there was no way I was giving the campus bookstore $180 for it.
Eleven chapters. Nine weeks. I haven’t even built the server yet. Ugh.
It’s not you. It’s the food.
In which I share some of my research about diet and overweight. It turns out dietary fat is fine; it’s the refined carbohydrates – white flour, white sugar – and the HFCS that are fucking killing you and making all those children fat and sedentary.
On January 5th, I started a weight-loss contest with a group of online friends. I weighed 160 pounds. I’m 5’4″ tall, so my ideal weight range is 122 – 150 lbs. I was officially overweight. My gut stuck out farther than my boobs, I was shaped like an old person, and I was tired and lazy.
I tracked my caloric intake, and pretended to be enthusiastic about exercise even though I’ve never particularly liked it. I hit the dietary target of 20% protein, 30% fat, and 50% carbohydrates pretty regularly, although if you’re a vegetarian on a calorie-restricted, low-fat diet it’s really hard to get enough protein.
I limited my fat intake brutally. I drank fat-free milk, bought low-fat cottage cheese and yogurt, cooked with spray oil, ate lots of beans and legumes, and had huge salads just like they tell us to. After all, “everybody knows” that to lose weight, one must restrict calories and exercise more. And that’s what I did.
The only problem is that, as logical as they seem, both of those medical theories have been disproven in study after study. Low-fat diets do not lower disease risk or help in weight loss. Exercise does not help with weight loss because it universally increases hunger, in study after study, making semi-starvation diets impossible to stick to and any weight loss achieved temporary and useless.
And you don’t know that these low-fat/exercise theories of health have been overturned because 1.) the AMA just, you know, hasn’t gotten around to admitting that they accidentally backed the wrong theories for seventy years; 2.) giant corporations who sell tons of low-fat foods don’t want you to know about it; and 3.) the media tends to be conservative about diet recommendations that don’t make their advertisers money.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I learned all that, I successfully followed my semi-starvation diet for eight weeks before I totally fucking lost control of it and found myself eating an entire bag of potato chips without conscious thought and arriving at Mexican restaurants before I even knew I’d decided to go out to eat. I’d lost 14 pounds, but found myself hungry all the time and obsessed with food. Continue reading It’s not you. It’s the food.
OMG I love this phone, you guys.
In which I upgrade.
I have retired my old clamshell phone finally, and joined the legions who carry smartphones shaped like bricks.
I am now the proud owner of an LG Optimus S, a mid-range Android phone. I love it. It’s fast, responsive, and replaces two devices completely. (My old phone and my iPod Touch are both going on eBay this weekend.) It looks cool. Google Voice is awesome. Google Sky is awesome. It runs KeePass with a Dropbox db without being a pain in the ass.
In short, all the Droid converts I know were right: it does everything the iPod Touch did, and some things even better.
Things like the APOD app that changes your wallpaper every day. Like AppBrain, which will help recover from a catastrophic loss or failure quickly by keeping a list of all your installed apps. Like the fact that there are multiple app stores, and no iTunes monstrosity to deal with. Like this awsome Tricorder app that actually does stuff. Continue reading OMG I love this phone, you guys.
First world problems.
In which I went out to eat.
I went to my CCNA class today. It’s been on Tuesdays at 1:30 for two terms now, but today there was an Intro to ColdFusion class in the room (do people still use ColdFusion?) and my instructor wasn’t in his office.
So naturally I went to eat instead.
I ordered cheese enchiladas with rice and beans (even though I no longer eat the rice), but when the meal arrived there was shredded chicken meat in those enchiladas, so I politely sent it back.
The cook just pulled the enchiladas off and replaced them, so five bites into my new meal I got a mouthful of the chicken that was more or less all over the plate. (I haven’t had chicken meat in my mouth in twenty-odd years. I really don’t like it.)
So I ate one enchilada – carefully checking each bite for stray chicken – and some of the beans, and then lost my interest in the meal altogether. It was too chicken-y and I guess I wasn’t that hungry after all. The waitress picked up the plate, and probably noticed the pile of chicken I’d assembled.
When she brought me my check, though, she also brought me a complimentary dessert. Which I also didn’t want to eat, because it was nothing but refined carbohydrates and I’m not eating refined carbohydrates these days. (I ate a portion of it anyway, because it had been an apology and I didn’t want to be a bitch.) (I also left her a 49% tip, because it wasn’t her fault.)
Most complicated meal EVAR. No meat, no refined carbs. If I keep accumulating trendy eating disorders, I’ll never be able to eat in a restaurant again.
Observations.
In which there’s just so much stupid shit going on that I can’t keep my mouth shut.
Here’s a list of unrelated items! I am basically bitching, here. YHBW.
1. Republicans Against War? MY ARSE.
Republicans against enforcing the Libyan no-fly zone “because it costs too much” are proof, as if we needed any, that politics are no longer about policy or even a set of beliefs but about absolutely nothing whatsoever. The GOP doesn’t like Obama because he’s a Democrat, and they’re going to block anything he does just to be contrary.
That kind of maturity is really attractive, gentlemen. Not. You rich fucks.
2. Science Fiction Would Have More Women If Not For Patriarchy!
There already are women in sci-fi. There already is science in sci-fi. Yeah, feminism and queer studies are cool, but give it a rest already: not everything is a fucking plot to punish you for having a uterus.
A lot of women don’t like science and just aren’t interested in it, period, and that’s why they drive the market for character-based, sociological science fiction. This is not something men have done! Men are not trying to keep women out of sci-fi, and there’s plenty of hard sci-fi written by women and read by women. Including me. But if I have to read one more hyper-academic, angry, factless article about how science fiction needs more women and more science, and about how those things aren’t there due to some imaginary cultural construct built by the penis people to keep women down, I will seriously go fucking ballistic. Continue reading Observations.
From the Inbox.
Dear Michelle,
Recently you may have had trouble instantly watching TV episodes or movies at Netflix due to technical issues.
We are sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused. If you attempted and were unable to instantly watch TV episodes or movies yesterday, click on this account specific link in the next 7 days to apply your 3% credit to your next billing statement for your Watch Instantly Unlimited plan. Credit can only be applied once.
Ready to start watching again? Check out our latest selection.
Again, we apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your understanding. If you need further assistance, please call us at 1-866-923-0898.
–The Netflix Team
What's awesome about Twitter? I'll tell you what's awesome about Twitter.
In which I like social media, and I don’t care who knows it.
First of all, I am a Sprint customer. Second of all, my contract’s up for renewal, which means I’m finally eligible for a new phone and I just got my tax return so maybe I could splurge a little and get a really cool one.
So I google “Sprint Android” and I click the top hit (which goes to sprint.com/android, and should take me right to the place I want to be), but instead I end up at the front page of the Sprint website, which is a customer service/sales/billing hell and so not a page containing a list of the Android phones I want to look at. In fact, I’m probably three to four levels above where I want to be.
All of which means that they’ve got a dynamic link fuck-up that’s probably costing them money. Plus, I’m irritated I have to manually drill down to the Android phones when I’ve already been online for nearly a minute and I should already be fucking looking at them. Continue reading What's awesome about Twitter? I'll tell you what's awesome about Twitter.
Okay, listen up, assholes.
In which I smack you around a little.
Here’s the deal. Gaddafi, a crazy person, whose family holds over half of Libya’s entire wealth, has been using a mercenary army to battle unarmed civilians. (A mercenary army made up of non-Libyans hired when Gaddafi lost control of the Libyan army after telling them to shoot their countrymen, their friends and family. These forces are NOT “pro-Gaddafi forces,” as you keep hearing, they are a combination of paid professionals and what’s left of the Libyan national army.)
What’s happening in Libya is that armies of mercenaries hired from sub-Saharan Africa are attacking normal, civilian Libyan citizens. Imagine that. Tanks and soldiers, opening fire into crowds of untrained, unarmed, non-combatant human beings. It would be like the National Guard coming to the elementary school you’re voting in and opening fire, killing everyone in the booths and in line. Do you get it now?
It’s a fucking abomination, a massive violation of human rights. Only a monster would think it’s “none of our business” or that it has “nothing to do with us”: we are the richest, most powerful nation in the world. It’s our duty to help the helpless. If we are capable of standing by while atrocities happen YET AGAIN, we might as well just go ahead and finish dropping dead of heart disease and diabetes en masse, because we deserve it. Continue reading Okay, listen up, assholes.